Peter Foster is the Telegraph's US Editor based in Washington DC. He moved to America in January 2012 after three years based in Beijing, where he covered the rise of China. Before that, he was based in New Delhi as South Asia correspondent. He has reported for The Telegraph for more than a decade, covering two Olympic Games, 9/11 in New York, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the post-conflict phases in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.

Three views of the Chinese economic recovery

Here's a question that everyone wants an answer to at the moment: 'Is China's economy showing the first green shoots of recovery?'

The answer (as so often with economics) is that it very much depends who you talk to, and how far ahead you dare to look.

On one level this is a statement of the obvious, but it's always worth remembering that economics is only in part a numerical science. Motive, interest and ideology all play a huge part in how you read the numbers.

Wen Jiabao, China's premier seems to think things are getting better. Speaking on the sidelines of the aborted ASEAN summit, Wen reckons (and I paraphrase) that 'things are still tough, but he can see 'positive changes' going forward.

China's £400bn stimulus package is kicking in, he says, bank lending is improving, real estate sales are coming back and latest trade figures show that China's exports declined year-on-year at a slower rate in March (17pc) than in February (25.7pc).

Mr Wen says these are all concrete reasons to believe that China's economy is "in the process of gradual recovery".

Perhaps I should take Mr Wen at face value – he is, after all China's premier – but something tells me I'd be a fool if I did.

Why? Well, I can recall at least three speeches in the last six months in which Mr Wen has spoken about the invaluable need for that most priceless of all economic commodities 'confidence'.

I can see why Wen said that, but unfortunately such statements only serve to devalue two other equally priceless political commodities – 'credibility' and 'trust'.

How do we know if Mr Wen really thinks the recovery is beginning, or if he's just trying to breathe some 'confidence' back into the system? Short answer is, we don't.

So what to do? Seek some politically 'independent' analysis, of which there is broadly two types: commerical and academic, although the can two sometimes overlap.

On the commercial side, my inbox is daily clogged with research notes and analysis from investment banks, fund management houses and trade organisations all reporting on their spheres of economic activity.

I paraphrase again, but the general theme is that things seem to be on the up. Investment is returning as China orders its banks to lend, real estate sales are starting up again and everyone connected to the construction industry is slathering at the projects now being expedited by Mr Wen's stimulus package.

On a non-institutional level, I also see confidence. Last week I attended a private talk by a senior Chinese executive from a global luxury goods brand who said the international media had it all wrong. China (and his business) was still growing. The future, he said, was fundamentally bright.

But such commercial Oracles obviously have interests of their own. After all, these were the same organisations who only a few years ago were pushing me equally conclusive and numerically supported reports that commodity, equity and asset prices were going to rise inexorably.

In the short term, I can see that some banks and businesses are going to do well out of China's stimulus plan, but that is a very different thing from China's economy being on the path to sustainable recovery.

Which brings us to a third category of analysts: the professors and policy wonks who don't have such obvious political or commercial axes to grind – even if they do have some ideological/intellectual ones.

Speak to these people – and I do as often as I can – and you start to get a more sobering picture of where China's economy is heading in the longer term.

While most seem to agree that Mr Wen's stimulus package is going to stabilize China's economic growth this year – the World Bank says 6.5pc, gloomier independent analysts say 5pc while Mr Wen is still shooting for a very 'confident' 8pc – it isn't addressing some big underlying structural problems.

Different economists come at this from differing perspectives, but many share the concern that China's investment-led growth plan isn't being matched by a growth in organic, grass-roots economic activity.

There's talk of better healthcare plans, boosting Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) and investing in R&D, but when you crunch the numbers (and here I rely on the calculations of brainier men than me) it's not looking like nearly enough to bring meaningful structural reform to China's domestic economy.

In summary, Mr Wen's £400bn stimulus will keep the 'China show' on the road for a couple of years (albeit inefficiently) but without either a pick-up in global demand (unlikely says the World Bank) or a serious increase in domestic consumption and productivity, China's green shoots will not put down the substantial roots needed for sustainable long-term growth – Mr Wen's fiscal fertiliser notwithstanding.